Foley

Confronted by a 90-minute monologue, my spirit usually quails. But Michael West's Foley, performed by Andrew Bennett and presented by Dublin's Corn Exchange, is quite outstanding. It's an exquisitely written account of the decline and fall, and ultimate inescapability, of the Irish Protestant inheritance that puts one in mind of the best of Elizabeth Bowen.

The speaker, Foley, is a middle-aged relic of the big-house, Protestant ascendancy: the world of the gentleman farmer and the teeming apple orchard that has passed through its own economic contradictions. Foley himself has rebelled against this world's arrogance, rudeness and insularity by, disastrously, marrying a Catholic. Now childless and alone, he is the last of the line: "The end product of all that evolution and fruitcake." Yet West's point is that the past always catches up with you, that there is something in the Protestant idea of solitary communion with one's maker that is inextinguishable.

West's vision is ambivalent and his writing superb. He can conjure up in a phrase or two the whole country-house ethos: "Christmases were for selective and confined misery. Easter was for reaching out and sharing it with others." He even gets away with a risky symbolic device in which Foley's imagined encounter with a galloping horse comes to stand for the life unlived and the road not taken. His vividly particular prose is given brilliant life by Bennett's performance, which, in Annie Ryan's production, encompasses both the spiritual solitude and defiant futility of the rebel against a dying culture.